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Eager to prove herself after losing her entire squad to Chryssalids (or perhaps just eager to get away), captain Tara Maclay was quick to volunteer for a solo undercover mission infiltrating an Exalt base.

With Tara gone, Lieutenant Dawn Summers did her best to lead a team of rookies against an ever increasing alien threat. She did the best she could, even managing a narrow victory in a very bloody battle against some Mutons, but as time went on it became clear that the aliens were winning this war.

To make matters worse, things went horribly wrong during Tara Maclay's extraction mission, and we lost both her and the information she had gone undercover to obtain.

At the end of the month, the council decided to cut all funding to the XCom project. The aliens win yet again.

107 aliens killed, 18 soldiers lost.

So I failed to make it past the third council report this time. Still, I'm getting better! Next time I'll make it to the fourth!

My "regular" impossible run is getting to the point where I really have to mess up in order to loose a mission. Having colonels with titan armor, plasma weapons and blaster launchers is the point where even impossible becomes doable.

Hence I started an ironman impossible run, where I'm now in the second month. Not looking forward to the terror mission. Didn't loose many soldiers yet, but that will change once Cryssalids will appear...

I see enemy health, perhaps something in your display options? Without seeing how much health each alien has it's getting even more difficult I gather.

And the game is really hard, I had three attempts on ironman impossible before my current one and in all of them I got 2 squads wiped within the first month. This is the first time most of my soldiers got out alive. Only problem is that I don't get much Meld due to my rather defensive playstyle at the moment. That will definitely bite me in the long run. Now I have 2 squadsight snipers and consider using my 2 heavies as their spotters in the upcoming terror mission. Wish me luck

Training roulette is a mixed bag. Yes, there can be some perhaps overpowered combinations, but you can also loose a couple of very strong abilities. In my classic ironman I had only two troopers that could take lightning reflexes for example, none of them an assault but one support and one sniper(!). So I ended up using my support to draw overwatch shots so that my assault could run in and gun. When my support was in the infirmary I got seriously "locked in" by overwatching aliens on a handful of missions.

Early on, enemy health displays don't matter very much. All of the aliens die in two (or fewer) hits, regardless of what you hit them with. The only time it causes problems is if you lose track of which aliens you wounded and which are still at full health, which only really happens if you lose sight of the enemy.

Later on it can get really stressful though. It's hard to gauge how close a Muton is to dying, so it's never clear whether you should focus one down or run for cover. It's also impossible to tell when a guaranteed grenade hit would be just enough to finish something off. And every new enemy type you encounter feels all the more mysterious and scary when you have no sense of how hard it will be to kill.

I like the "learning through experimentation" gameplay that this encourages though, and I like the added drama that the imprecision adds to the game.

ffs reached the terror mission and it's one of the most awful places to deal with Cryssalids... -.-
Lots of cover blocking sight, difficult to reach higher ground, few clear lines of sight, Cryssalids will have the best of times chewing on my squad too tired to take that on today...

I made another run at Enemy Within's Impossible Ironman mode. This time I survived 110 days, which is a new record for me. 158 enemies killed, 11 soldiers lost.

This play-through provided one of my favorite battles yet. My team was trying to defend a data transponder against an overwhelming force of Exalt agents. They outnumbered us 3 to 1 and had us absolutely surrounded. Things looked hopeless. But my covert agent that had infiltrated the Exalt cell was able to run around the map hacking communications arrays, which kept the exalt agents confused and unable to attack. With the "Run and Gun" perk she could sprint between communication towers and still hack them on the same turn she moved, which allowed her to shut down the Exalt agents twice in a row. She waited until the enemy was right on top of my squad to execute this maneuver, and in the confusion they were able to turn the tide of the battle. In the end my entire squad was injured, but alive. Success!

Well, sort of...

I actually felt like I was in pretty good shape at this point, and expected to survive at least another month longer. But then a crucial terror mission hit at the worst possible moment. Most of my squad was still in the infirmary following that epic battle, and new recruits were still a day away from arriving. I tried to wait for my new recruits since it looked like they *might* arrive in time, but they didn't, and I ended up losing the game because I failed to respond in time. Ah well, I probably would have lost that mission anyway since I only had half a squad to send in.

XCom is still a lot of fun and I still feel like I'm learning and getting better at it. I'll probably try another run soon.